The Hard Work Of Writing: An Interview With Author And Historian David McCullough

Scott Berinato at the Harvard Business Review interviewed popular author and historian David McCullough.

Americans now hear their history in David McCullough’s clarion voice, the one that narrated the acclaimed Civil War and American Experience documentary series. Still, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of popular and praised histories of Harry Truman, John Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt, among others, doesn’t consider himself an expert on anything. (“If you think you are, you’ll get yourself in trouble.”) He is a storyteller first, who, at 79, is celebrating the success of his most recent book, The Greater Journey, about Americans in Paris, and who says he is “fired up” to start his next book. 

... I’m having a ball. I can’t wait to get out of bed every morning. To me, it’s the only way to live. When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn’t mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The love of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. I keep telling students, Find work you love. Don’t concern yourself overly about how much money is involved or whether you’re ever going to be famous. I’m giving a talk at Dartmouth this week. It’s called the Hard Work of Writing. And it is hard work. But in hard work is happiness.

You can read the rest of the interview via the below link:

http://hbr.org/2013/01/david-mccullough/ar/1 

Note: The above photo by William B. McCollough is from Simon and Schuster's David McCullough page at http://pages.simonandschuster.com/davidmccullough 

Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created The OSS And Modern American Espionage

I'm reading Douglas Waller's Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created The OSS and Modern American Espionage.

Simon and Schuster, the publisher of Wild Bill Donovan, wrote the below description of the book:

He was one of America's most exciting and secretive generals—the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, "Wild Bill" Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country's first national intelligence agency) and the father of today's CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan's relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.

William Joseph Donovan's life was packed with personal drama. The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, he married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname "Wild Bill" for his intense leadership and the Medal of Honor for his heroism. After the war he made millions as a Republican lawyer on Wall Street until FDR, a Democrat, tapped him to be his strategic intelligence chief. A charismatic leader, Donovan was revered by his secret agents. Yet at times he was reckless—risking his life unnecessarily in war zones, engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies—and he endured heartbreaking tragedy when family members died at young ages.

Wild Bill Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in his OSS sneaking behind enemy lines for sabotage, breaking into Washington embassies to steal secrets, plotting to topple Adolf Hitler, and suffering brutal torture or death when they were captured by the Gestapo. It is also a tale of political intrigue, of infighting at the highest levels of government, of powerful men pitted against one another. Donovan fought enemies at home as often as the Axis abroad. Generals in the Pentagon plotted against him.

J. Edgar Hoover had FBI agents dig up dirt on him. Donovan stole secrets from the Soviets before the dawn of the Cold War and had intense battles with Winston Churchill and British spy chiefs over foreign turf. Separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and the occasional spectacular failures of Donovan's intelligence career.

It makes for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.

David Wise, a noted author and expert on espionage, reviewed Wild Bill Donovan for the Washington Post. You can read his review via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/25/AR2011022503043.html

Interview With Thriller Writer Stephen Hunter, Author Of Dead Zero

 

 

John J. Miller at National Review Online inteviewed thriller writer Stephen Hunter, the author of the new Bob Lee Swagger thriller Dead Zero (Simon and Schuster).

You can listen to the audio interview via the below link:

http://radio.nationalreview.com/betweenthecovers/post/?q=ODgzMTBlOGMwOGJlZWUyZjlmNTI2Mzg2YmRjYWIzZGE=

I've enjoyed Stephen Hunter's previous thrillers about Bob Lee Swagger, the former Marine Vietnam-era sniper, and I look forward to reading Dead Zero.

*

You can read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of Hunter's last thriller via the link below:

*

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/ISniperReviewPhilaInquirer.jpg